The Story That Almost Wasn’t…by Brad Marks

Unfortunately, it has been a bit since we last talked. Not to steal any valor from the fine men in the Seals organization, but we are officially in our Hell Week[s]. Traditionally, our big haunted trail event (link here) would be scheduled for next weekend, however, due to the insubordinate ankle, we opted to push the date to mid October rather than cancel it outright. Good move as there is no way we would have been ready by this week. That delay doesn’t mean we can sit back and take it easy – for the last several weeks I have been getting very little sleep due to coordinating tasks, fixing broken props, building new scares and everything else related to the haunt. I just looked at the current project plan and there are 306 tasks at the macro level and that is growing daily ugh. Add in dealing with rehab visits, daily workouts and everything else life has been throwing at us (more like a barrage) and sleep has become a luxury. Fortunately we live for the haunt so that is wrapped in enjoyment (big thanks to my brother Ron who has been spending every weekend down here to help us out). Long story short, overly pressed for time, so I’ll probably be a bit scarce for some time going forward. I’ll try to keep you updated as we progress to the big event. Upmost apologies for delays in responding to comments and keeping up with all your fine blogs during this time. For now, Brad is going to take time away from preparing for his upcoming field assignment and step in to give me a breather with one of his adventures. While I take a brief few minutes to celebrate being released from crutches today, I’ll let Brad take it away…

Lately, Jan and I have been taking on more global photo assignments for Wildlife Intrigued.  It’s not that we are running out of birds locally, far from it.  We want to get to the far-flung parts of the map while we are young enough to handle the strenuous travel distances and locations.  Sometimes, Jan and I use a travel agent to help with details in a part of the world we’ve not yet been to.  Often times we have already been to a location and take pleasure in setting up travel on our own, even if the Intrigued corporate jet isn’t available.  (Isn’t that worldwide pop tour over yet?)

For the same reason, these stories almost never appear in a linear fashion.  It’s sort of a “timey-wimey” thing.  Sometimes I have a story just waiting for me to take photographs to complete it.  Or I have a bunch of photos, and no story.  A TARDIS would be helpful in the story writing process sometimes.  This story was actually started way before the one about an Eastern Kingbird (link here) that we found about 100 yards further around the lake a bit earlier in the same day.  Circumstances, our travel assignments, and me almost deleting all of the bird photos lead to this one being delayed for over a year. (see end of story for details)  

During one of our back-to-back-to-back photo assignments from Intrigued HQ, Jan and I were on the downhill side of an early summer trip to Colorado visiting our daughter Allyson.  She is also the editor working in the Wildlife Intrigued Western (or Mountain) office.  Both the Intrigued corporate jet and motorhome were otherwise occupied, so we completed the 14-hour journey in our Regional Office vehicle.  Truthfully, I like travelling this way because we can take much more gear along than the airlines allow.  As an added bonus, Jan and I get to stop at Runza for lunch on our way across Nebraska.  Both directions.

Hit the jump to read more about today’s featured feathered friend.

We found ourselves with mostly a free day when Allyson had to actually do her primary job.  I can hardly remember what that’s like after being retired for a few years.  Sitting in the luxury hotel suite (still waiting for my Intrigued corporate expense account to clear), Jan and I each threw a virtual dart at a map to pick birding stops for the day.  Thankfully, two of them ended up very near each other on the map.  At our first stop earlier in the day was at Walden Ponds near Boulder.  Our second stop was St. Vrain State Park and campground north of Denver. 

After assembling the cameras, Jan and I left the car in the parking lot and began to walk the trail around the lake.  The trail was lined with hedge-like trees.  The “hedge” was densely packed, well over my head, and provided a nice barrier from the rest of the campground.  Imagine, if you will, an English hedge along a walking path or a C-road (one car wide) and that’s precisely what this felt like.  A very short way along the trail, and I’m only talking 100 feet or so from the parking lot, there was a small break in the trees above head height (my head height anyway).

Jan immediately pointed her camera and lens towards the sky.  Three little silhouettes were perched on a dead tree branch.  I decided to simply watch the birds for a minute.  It occurred to me a few vacations ago that I had no visual memory of some birds outside of what the camera viewfinder offered.  Sometimes the photo in my memory is better than what the camera can capture.  I wasn’t expecting much from these little silhouetted shapes at the time.  It wasn’t until the digital dark room that I was able to tease out some detail and color from the silhouetted birds.

Even though this Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) appeared to be singing, we couldn’t hear it over the highway noise a couple of hundred yards away.  I thought that the dense hedges would have blocked more noise than they did.  At least there weren’t any college kids with rented sports cars parked on top of rocks carrying on a conversation on their mobile phones in speaker mode (link here).

I really wasn’t sure about my field identification at first.  One of the traits of swallows is flying endless loops scooping up airborne insects.  These were sitting perfectly still, no ID help there.  The blue reflecting off their back and wings, plus the orangey, rufous, rusty colored breast are good indicators.  The slightly darker “rusty” throat and forehead sealed the deal for these to be Barn Swallows.  How’d I do?

I know we aren’t supposed to anthropomorphize, but sometimes the pose is too perfect.  “What?!  I can’t hear what you’re chirping!”  Or maybe they were arguing about the quality of flies located by this small lake.  Were these three siblings, or simply part of an awkward teenage Swallow gathering?  It didn’t really matter since they were all interacting very nicely for the camera.  Or maybe, just maybe, one was saying, “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”  hehehe  (Kids, go ask your parents about this pop culture reference from the late 1960’s to mid-1970’s.)

I’m certain this one was not happy with the highway being so close, or it has just woken up and still had bed-feathers.  Merlin wasn’t much help because the highway noise drowned out everything these swallows were putting out.  I would like to ask the good folks who created Merlin to include some sort of traffic filter to help identify birds near busy metro areas. 

I got the feeling we were being snubbed.  Surely there must be something more worthy to photograph so will you two please leave us alone?!  Perhaps they were vigorously discussing the relativistic differences between a European and an African swallow and how much weight they could carry.  One was saying the African swallow could carry more, the other disagreed.  The third was wondering why it even mattered.  It is also possible they were arguing over whose turn it was to scoop up mud to build a nest.  Very few of their preferred structures were within sight, so I’m betting that wasn’t it.  Barn Swallows are known to fly in a mob to chase away predators like hawks, gulls, or even a lonely grackle that wanders too close to a nest.  Barn Swallow parents sometimes get help from other birds (usually older siblings from prior clutches) to feed their nestlings.  Unrelated young birds may help as well, that’s awfully nice of them.

Jan and I were fortunate that the swallows were very tolerant of I-25 traffic.  I was having a hard time hearing Jan talking quietly while she was standing right next to me.  I could make out the camera shutter clicking away, but just barely, over the background highway noise.   

Barn Swallows are the most widely distributed and abundant swallow species in the world.  They can be found in big numbers nearly everywhere from the middle of Canada to near the southern tip of South America.  Bird watchers would not be surprised to see them in Africa below the Sahara, Europe, and most of Asia (except Siberia).  The overall Barn Swallow population has declined about 25% since 1966, but still only ranking them in the Least Concern category.  Once hunted in the 19^th century for the hat trade, human expansion has given them more of their preferred habitat: structures to build nests on.

I’m always amazed at how well birds adapt to their environments.  We’ve seen Monk Parakeets building nests in urban areas on power poles, osprey and falcons nesting on ledges or bridges in big cities, and normally skittish swallows seemingly calmed by the din of constant interstate (motorway) traffic.  Maybe they are simply doing what humans are doing, moving to where the opportunity is located (food and shelter). 

Thank you for reading.  If you want to see more Barn Swallow photos, please visit here.

Credits:

Thanks again to Jan for proofreading and editing.  Thanks to Jan for about half of the photos in this article.

The end:

Sometimes birds “appear” in a setting we, and our cameras, aren’t quite ready for.  For example, I’m shooting in wooded area and one decides to take to the brightly lit sky, or as Brian calls it “bird on a wire”.  Or one is free flying, and I’m happily tracking along, and the bird decides to hit the dense shade of the trees.  There are completely different camera settings for those two environments.  That’s precisely what happened in this case.  Jan and I had been photographing earlier in the day in very green trees with overcast conditions.  Thinking wooded areas in a campground would be similar, I never made updates to our camera settings.  As you can tell from the photos, there is a very bright sky behind the birds.  During my initial pass through the photos, I can see they are nearly silhouettes, so I’m deleting photos with abandon.  Then I had a thought from one of Brian’s earlier stories about catching a bobcat in extreme low light conditions (here).  I stopped deleting photos, recovered the ones I had nuked earlier and vowed to come back to them.  After watching far too many videos on how to reclaim details from the brink of “pixel heck”; most detail still there just way underexposed.  Full Pixel Hell is what Brian had to deal with in his photos, nearly zero pixel data available at all.  I was able to salvage several of the photos.  At least I was able to tell it was a bird and could probably identify said bird.  Some photos were still far too full of noise.  I re-nuked them from my Lightroom catalog, saving valuable disk space.  These photos are all JPEG images from our Nikon D300 cameras, which have since been replaced with D500’s with much better low light capability.  Maybe next time I won’t be as quick to delete “silhouette” photos.